Manifesto

We are Claire Kaplan and Sam Hunter. We met at UCSD in 2007 and have been making art together since 2010. We are a two-headed beast that lurks in the basements, attics, studios and (if they'd have us) big houses where you can find performance happening.

“I had hoped to be shown some act of life traced back to its source and to its mystery by connecting links that my daily occupations afford me neither power nor occasion to study. I had gone thither hoping that the beauty, the grandeur, and the earnestness of my humble day-by-day existence would for one instant be revealed to me, that I would be shown the I-know-not what presence, power, or god that is ever with me.”

Maurice Maeterlinck

As theater makers, we are in pursuit of Awe, the emotional recognition of the objective fact that we are small in the universe and there are dimensions and experiences beyond the everyday. We do not care if you call this the spiritual, the esoteric, the psychic, the result of mirror neurons, or the furthest limit of human empathy. Theater should push us to recognize that something beyond the quotidian is happening. Performances that have inspired awe in us recently include: Taylor Mac's A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Christopher Rüping's Dionysus Stadt, The Rude Mech's The Method Gun, Gob Squad's Kitchen, and Theatre Movement Bazaar's Big Shot.

Theater has a liveness to it but to be truly living it must be responsive to its audience. Any performance that would happen more or less exactly the same way regardless of who is watching is a dead performance. Performances must be built in such a way that the audience's presence can actually affect what happens on stage. Audiences are extremely well-behaved these days. There's no guarantee they will shout their feelings at the stage. Therefore they must be invited to participate. They must be treated not like a formal audience, but like a group of people who have come over to your house, because that is what has happened. This may mean a lot of direct address, or creating space for them to offer input, or it may simply mean that the staging is spare enough that the audience is required to actually use their imaginations to create scenery, costume, etc.; a significant suspension of disbelief. Performances we've made which embody this include Lady Into Fox, Olympia, Olympia, Olympia!, and Wandersterne.

To ensure a responsiveness in our work we: greet our audiences directly, treat them kindly, build trust slowly and deliberately, never asking too much of them too early, check in with them to make sure they understand and ask them how they feel, and often greet latecomers and catch them up on what they've missed. We also refrain from over-scripting, giving our actors instructions and activities rather than text, and work with plays/playwrights which support this kind of direct engagement. Whatever we call the collective experience of the spiritual, we know it's collective and spiritual. We don't need a lot of text and tchotchkes getting in between the actual humans performing the rite.

Though dogmatic in form and purpose, we are less so in subject matter. The questions we come back to time and again include: how do we respond to feelings of powerlessness? How do we respond to grief? How does our mythology influence our behavior and our larger systems? How have our families shaped our destinies? Due to our backgrounds, a question which is becoming more and more prevalent is “what's going on with Jews these days?”

These questions are ours, and we think they are good ones, but we acknowledge they are not particularly politically urgent. They are questions which invite deeper looks into human systems of self-organizing, but not immediate problems in search of solutions.

These urgent questions are obviously important, but we don't think theater is the medium to address them. Theater is slow, inefficient, expensive, and—above all—better suited for humanity's more spiritual concerns. Politics is, frankly, too material. It also has the disadvantage of giving one's plays a shelf-life, which for selfish and mortal reasons, we resist.

How we make is as important as what we make. Our process is defined by collaboration and rigor.

Actors are not tools. They are not puppets, they are not vessels. Actors are whole human beings tasked with creating a spiritual connection and channeling the divine for the benefit of their audience. Only they and the audience can know what will do that.

Actors who “just want to tell stories,” or “just love becoming someone else” lack the vision to participate in this kind of theater. We require our actors to have a clear statement of purpose. Good if it happens to be the one you're reading now. Better if it's something else.

Every project is different because the world was designed to make most things boring and stupid. Funding is irregular, careers in the arts are unstable, people need to work “real jobs” to eat. But if things were ideal, things would go something like this:

An artist makes a proposal—a question, an image, a situation—and a group of performers creates from there. Movement, dialogue, further images, further situations, iterating on and on.

Who is the director? Who is the writer? These are irrelevant questions. The actors have the vision for what sort of theater they want. Those of us who may have more training as directors and writers may serve as an outside eye more frequently than not, but we trade roles as necessary.

The more structurally-minded of us—the natural editors and dramaturgs—take this material and forge it into something resembling a play. The script is full of invitations to the actors to communicate extemporaneously with the audience. The script is full of opportunities for the audience to ruin the show.

The script should, at some level, be unreadable. The performance is the theater, not the text. Once a play is written it's an old play anyway. If the play you read and the play you see are too closely related, it would make more economic sense to tack the play to the wall and invite the audience to read it one at a time.

We include the audience as early and as often as possible. They are the fourth collaborator, after the director, the performer, and the designers. Their contribution is equally important. And if our performances are to be truly responsive, we have to practice different ways to respond to a living audience.

At some point the material world asserts itself and we behave like a more traditional theater company. Somebody must take point on production, we must plug ourselves in to the technical requirements of whatever space we perform in. This is not the space for innovation. Deadlines and scarcity often necessitate hierarchy, but it is hierarchy with the consent of the governed.

The most important question. We like the donning and doffing of masks, the movement between character and something that resembles the actor's true self. The only true self is whatever pure consciousness exists in the universal oneness of it all, but until we experience the sweet obliteration of total ego death we present as “people” who are performing “characters” and we go back and forth between those personas repeatedly. This allows us to create a larger context to the work, to connect with the audience more directly, to self-consciously call attention to the rite rather than masking it in solemn superiority. All may enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Some things which we have found can often help inspire awe in the theater include: superb singing, synchronous movement, heightened language, heightened emotions, and magician-like reveals (wonder is the poor man's awe). As mentioned previously we greet our audience directly, treat them kindly, etc. etc. The performer is as much a part of the performance as the play, as the text, as the characters.

We despise so-called “authenticity.” We despise rigid notions of identity. When your mother told you it was “just a phase,” she was right. Show me a permanent state of the self, mom! Our performances reflect this. Though the performer is present, using their own name, the biography they assert may be truth or fiction, that's up to the performer each night. Our theater is self-conscious.

So much for character. What else happens? We create all images as much as possible with the actors' bodies. That is our primary material in the theater and we do ourselves a disservice when we rely on other things to do our work for us—scenery, lights, sound, music, screens. We are a low-tech theater. We don't reject technology, we are simply extremely judicious about its use. We're Poor Theater people.

We like Théâtre du Soleil. Processions, collective song. Lots of fun.

Our theater is better than most theater because our theater is theater. Our theater is not a movie that can spit on you. Our theater is not a TV pilot that was too long for primetime. Our theater uses the actual material facts of our art as a strength to be embraced, not a limitation to be subverted.